WRITINGS OF 5AM HOUSTON, 1855
146
see the subject of legislation for negroes introduced into the Sen• ate. I do not think it is a proper place for it. I have never recognized the right of the Senate to do it, and I never will; and there I take issue with the honorable Senator in that particular. But, independent of that, the Indians are a people who are upon our borders. We are brought in contact with them. We have taken their soil, their country. They have yielded to superior intelligence, and to the spirit of domination inherent in our race. They are a feeble race, yielding to the pressure of circumstances, and to the mastery of white men. But, sir, if they are inferior, and have fallen beneath our prowess, and they are prostrate, let us raise them up; let us elevate them; let us bring them to equality with ourselves as to intelligence, for they are not inferior in native capacity, they are not inferior in the employment of mechanical arts. What did the Senator from California [Mr. Weller] say yesterday? He stated that the wild Indian boys, who were taken in California, and put to agricul- tural pursuits, learned with the same readiness that the white boys did, to plow, and the arts of agriculture, so far as they had been tried. It was manly testimony, and it commends the gentle- man and his experience to consideration. He tells you, too, that a few years ago, there were not less than ten thousand Indians in four counties, who have now dissolved and melted away, until but a fraction over three thousand remain. With the vast num- ber that are still there, perhaps the proportion of diminution will soon be as great. We ought to look with some degree of commiseration upon these people. It is not the duty of every gentleman to feel sympathy for them, but he should feel a manly respect for himself; he should feel for humanity in any shape, for a merciful man will be merciful to his beast. They are de- graded and sunk by their contact with the white man. They have, unfortunately, first to learn his vices, and, by degrees, to glean his virtues. But yet we see, under these influences, nations rise, become respectable, intelligent, scientific, and not only scien- tific, or learned, but we find them with their judicial department, their political department, their administrative department, and their Christian department. You find, in the last twenty years, not less than seventy ministers of the Gospel have grown up among the Creeks, the last to raise a hostile arm against the United States. Why not produce the same result with other tribes? My distinguished friend from Michigan [Mr. Cass] well knows that the Indian is susceptible, not only of improvement,
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